No tabs in post PLEASE!!! (was Re: partial list sort)

[François Pinard]

[Steve Holden]

> "Daniel T."
>> Alex Martelli <aleax at aleax.it> wrote:
>> > Terry Reedy wrote:
>> >         ...
>> > > Tabs are bad for Usenet posting if you want stupid people like me who
>> > > use Outlook Express to read posted code.
>> >
>> > Seconded!  They're almost as bad for (expletive deleted) people like ME,
>> > who use KDE's KNode (0.6.1 with KDE 2.2.2 at least, haven't tried more
>> > recent versions yet).
>> >
>> > PLEASE folks, even if you're tabs-maniacs, make SURE you turn them
>> > into spaces when posting or mailing your sources...!!!
>>
>> You have got to be kidding...
>
> Well, that all depends whether you want readers to be able to see the code
> as you wrote it rather than the code as mangled by whatever gets in the way
> between your fingers and their eyeballs.

There is some common sense that people often forget when we come to these
things.  These pop up recurrently, all over, in a variety of flavours.

Deep down, it all depends where the mangling occurs.  If at the originator
site, then it is the originator's responsibility to correct the problem.
But when the mangling occurs at the recipient's site, this is clearly the
recipient's responsibility to get or use some sensible software.  I've seen
a constant push, for years, by recipients using broken software, asking the
whole planet to be polite and help them cope with their brokenedness.  That
push should be considered unwelcome, and politeness is misplaced here.

This is really the base principle.

The problem is tinily more concentrated now around deciding whether a
message in transit is broken or not.  _This_ might be a religious issue.

Should messages in transit have TABs or not?  For one, I surely do not have
a firm, definitive opinion.  The fact that many terminals and applications
automatically define TAB at multiples of 8 columns does not necessarily make
it universal.  MIME (or whatever) does not have a way to describe what is
the meaning of a TAB in the incoming text.  So I guess that on the ground of
global cooperation, TABs are better avoided in fluent text.  Without any
kind of dependable clue about their meaning, TABs should be transported
unaltered by transmission agents.

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard